I am a sponge to language, completely permeable. People laugh at me sometimes for my attempts to avoid knowledge of new and improved vulgarities… they do not understand, perhaps, the distress of finding something added to your vocabulary that lessens it and drags down the tone. I have the same attitude, in part, to other things—if we are collections of our experiences, part of the formation and preservation of our identity and character is in regulating the experiences in which we take part.

But language, specifically, has always been a medium in which I am particularly interested and vulnerable. I have a tendency, which happily I am aware of (unlike my mother) to acquire the accents of those with whom I talk—I constantly strain, for instance, in talking with my Australian boss and my Carolinian boss, not to acquire their respective tall vowels and soft drawl. I still have a distressingly Midwestern tendency to find that the floor “needs swept”, and while I have successfully refrained from much “reckoning” in the wake of Firefly-watching, I have descried “all manner of” verbal tics from that source.

It should be no surprise, then, to you all, and certainly may explain a certain round-about prolixity not always evident in my posting here, when I tell you that both Charles Dickens and Jane Austen have a huge effect on my speech, and especially my composition, whenever I peruse a book of either worthy’s making. I find myself attending to my usual correspondence with no want of delicate phrases and genteel circumlocution. I find myself wishing to ‘shew’ and ‘chuse’. These are all, of course, the influences of the amiable Jane—Boz, on the other hand, only encourages those habits of whimsical oververbiage which are already deep-engrained in my heart, soul, and language center. I have recently revisited Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities, and Mansfield Park, as well as encountering for the first time Barnaby Rudge and Bleak House, and therefore I am steeped in the words and attitudes of my two literary friends.

So if I seem, my friends, more than usual verbose; if my language seems more than usual complex and stilted; if I betray genteel confusion and shock at the most common instances of vulgarity and unkind speech; in that case, talk to the books, cuz the faerye don’t care.